During the final days before the Summer Break 2016 started, the students of class 9a and of the Leistungskurs Kunst (grade 12) visited the exhibition „Chinese Whispers – Ingo Middelstaedt mit der Sammlung Peter Raue“ at Haus am Waldsee. Along came a group of teacher trainees of Fachseminar Kunst Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. They were to observe the students cross-year approach to the exposed installations. The ninth graders were split into groups of five and lead by two upper secondary art students. After exploring the set-up of the art show, each group picked an installation by Ingo Middelstaedt to analyze and interpret. The results of investigation were presented with the support of an old-school visualization on A3 paper. The students were given very limited possibilities of presentation materials and had to stick to paper and markers, scissors and glue. An evaluation of the inter-year project showed a high level of student satisfaction. Have a look at the task sheet and the impressions of this successful joint project that turned out to become the foundation of the Year 10 Project just after Summer Break (in 2016-2017).

NMS at Young Audience Film Award Day (2016)

On Sunday the 8th of May 2016 six students from our school and Mrs Sekhon attended the Young Audience Film Award Day. This is an annual film event organised by the European Film Academy.

Young viewers from the age of 12-14 were invited to watch three European films and be part of the jury to choose the award-winning film. This time 28 European countries participated and the films were screened simultaneously in 28 different cities all over Europe.

As the audience we watched the three movies and after each movie discussed and rated it. Later that evening the winners were broadcasted on a livestream from Erfurt. This year’s winner is “Miss Impossible”, a French movie by Emilie Deleuze, about a teenage girl named Aurore who isn’t the best in school, nevertheless quite clever. She figures out that she can sing in a band and let some steam out that way. “Girls Lost”, a Swedish movie by Alexandra-Therese-Keining, also about a girl who is being bullied and isn’t comfortable with her body and gender. She and her friends find a mysterious plant which transforms them into boys if they drink its nectar. This movie really made a lot of people think about how kids who are not comfortable with their gender might feel. Third place was a Turkish movie called “Rauf” by Soner Camer and Baros Kaya about a boy who lives in a small Kurdish village in the mountains. Rauf becomes an apprentice to a carpenter and slowly learns about the long-going political conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish rebels. At the same time he has a crush on Zana who is much older and he tries to win her love with the color pink.

We enjoyed watching all the films although it was quite tiring. It was also interesting to see which film was chosen by the audience in the other European cities.

This past Friday the year seven’s had the opportunity to participate in anti-racism-workshops at school. On offer were four different workshops. We were allowed to decide which workshop to take. I and twenty others signed up for the anti-racism-rap workshop. We were allowed to create our own rap. The lyrics contained anti-racism ideas and thoughts. The aim was to find out about the history of rap gangs and how they were dividing people’s rights. Racism had a lot to do with rap gangs and how they used to have lower rights. That’s how rap was created. It was like a diary that had rough words to create a story or a scene. This was the anti-racisum-rap workshop.